DISCLAIMER: This story is based on characters and situations created and owned by… no, wait, scratch that. This story is partially based on actual historical figures and events, and partially based on my own hours of twisted fantasies produced by seeing Tombstone one too many times. No money is being made and no offense is intended.
Posted By: Elspethdixon
Ships: Morgan/Louisa, Wyatt/several people
Notes: Not part of "Gunslinger." This thing has been sitting half-completed on my hard drive for months, waiting for me to finish it and give it a title (anyone who knows which line in the Iliad the title comes from gets massive geek brownie points). Now, here it is for your reading pleasure, in all it's AU-ish, character-death-laden glory.
Not My Fate
If he were honest with himself, he would admit that he had known all along things would end up like this. It wasn't as if they weren't guilty of murder; they were in fact, guilty of it several times over, and last he had checked, "those bastards shot my brother" was not an admissible defense in any but the most informal frontier court.
Bat had tried his best to keep the two of them from being extradited back to Arizona to face trial, using every legal trick he could think of—he knew what it was like to watch a brother die, and thoroughly understood even it he didn't entirely approve. In the end, though, even Bat Masterson's best efforts had failed in the face of the clear-cut evidence against them.
Morgan Earp and John H. Holliday would hang tomorrow morning for the murders of Frank Stillwell, Bill Brocious, Ike Clanton, Johnny Ringo… the list went on. And the worst part of it was that none of it had really been worth it anyway. None of the killings—executions, really—had brought Wyatt back, and now Louisa was going to be a widow, and Virgil and James would lose yet another brother.
Not for the first time, Morgan wondered if things would have gone differently had he died instead of Wyatt, that night in Tombstone…
He had been over at Virgil's house, planning their departure—there would take Louisa, Allie, and Maddie to Tucson and put them on a train out of there, with Virgil to guard them, like Wyatt had suggested, while Morgan and Wyatt took care of things in town—when the messenger had come bursting in, babbling something about Doc and Wyatt and blood.
Morgan was on his feet and out the door after him in a moment, ignoring the pain as the movement pulled at the stitches in his back and side. It was funny, how he knew instantly what had happened, knew it deep down in his gut, a sick, hollow feeling that made his heart beat slower.
They had ambushed Virgil on the street, damn near blowing his arm off, tried to shoot Morgan in the back while he played pool, the bullet missing his kidney and sliding across his ribs only because he had chosen just that moment to twist aside and try to knock the nine ball into the corner pocket. They had broken into Mayor Clum's house and shot up his wife. Of course they would go after Wyatt next. Three Earp brothers, three targets, and the fact that the Cowboys had missed on the first two wouldn't have stopped them from trying again.
Morgan should have seen it coming.
They all should have seen it coming.
When Morgan reached the doorway of the Oriental, time seemed to stop for a moment, as he took in the table, knocked onto its side, the deck of cards, scattered across the floorboards like fallen leaves, the two men on the floor in the midst of them.
It was a familiar scene, something Morgan had beheld at least three times before, one of them only a few weeks ago, but this time, the players were reversed. This time, it was Doc Holliday who knelt on the floor with Wyatt cradled in his arms, and Wyatt who was coughing up blood.
And Morgan had simply stood there, struck motionless with horror. Stood there while onlookers crowded in, drawn off the street by the whisper of murder. Stood there while Behan and his minions materialised out of nowhere to shake their heads knowingly and mouth satisfied platitudes. Stood there while his brother died, shot through the chest and breathing out pink bubbles of blood.
Only when Josephine Marcus appeared in the doorway beside him did he break out of his stupor, stepping in front of her and turning her away to that she could not look at what was inside the room, would not see…
It was useless, of course. She had seen everything the moment she reached the threshold, just as Morgan had. Just as Maddie did when she arrived moments later, hair disheveled and a robe hanging open over her nightgown, the pupils of her eyes huge with a dose of laudanum that wasn't nearly powerful enough to block out the shock of seeing her husband dead.
She had sobbed Wyatt's name and flung herself through the doorway, not even noticing Josephine where she stood still and white-faced, tears leaking out of her dark eyes until her stage make-up smeared, only to be brought up short a few feet away from her husband's body, as Doc looked up at her and snarled something low and vicious. Morgan didn't hear what it was, and he never asked.
Two days later, right before the funeral, Maddie had overdosed on laudanum. Louisa found her lying motionless on the bed she and Wyatt had shared, little glass bottles lying empty around her. They buried her next to Wyatt.
Doc got blind drunk the night of the funeral, and wept the first tears Morgan had ever seen from him. He'd been dry-eyed when Morgan had found them, and had stayed that way while Josephine and Maddie—and Morgan—cried, staring with a face empty of expression at Wyatt's blood covering his hands, his waistcoat, the floor, had stayed that way up until they had lowered Wyatt's body into the ground and piled the earth back in on top of him. Then, at the wake, he had proceeded to fall apart utterly, sinking back the better part of a bottle of whisky and sobbing incoherently in Kate's arms, mumbling over and over that it wasn't fair, that Wyatt wasn't supposed to die first.
Kate had left the next morning, without giving a reason or saying good-bye to anyone except Doc, and once the gambler's hangover had worn off, he and Morgan had gone hunting.
Frank Stillwell had died first, shot through the gut by Doc's ivory-handled colt. Morgan had put a bullet in his brain afterwards, to spare him the agony of a drawn out death. After the shoot-out at the O.K. Corral, he had felt shaken, guilty. This time, when he pulled the trigger, he felt nothing.
After him had come Curly Bill, his chest blown open by a shotgun borrowed from Virgil, who couldn't do any shooting himself with his arm still in a sling, but who had given Morgan the weapon with a grim reminder to watch for the recoil before he and Allie had taken the train to California. Virgil didn't believe in vengeance, but he didn't make the smallest attempt to stop Morgan and Doc from seeking it, either.
Doc had shot Johnny Ringo, the bullet taking him right in the temple, and had looked almost disappointed that the other man, supposedly a deadly gunfighter, hadn't even managed to get off a shot in his direction first. He'd killed Ike Clanton, too, getting him in the belly with a knife. Ike, whom Morgan had always taken for a coward, had died with surprising bravery. Rather than beg for his life as expected, he'd all but dared Doc to kill him, looking him straight in the eye while the knife went in. Most likely he'd known that begging wouldn't have helped.
Ike was the one who got them caught, in the end. Morgan and Doc had left him for dead, bleeding out from a severed artery, but when Behan found him, he'd had just enough strength left to identify his killers as Morgan Earp and "that goddamn crazy lunger."
Morgan had been the one who suggested that they flee back to Kansas—by that point, Doc really hadn't cared whether he was caught or not—but the escape attempt proved futile in the end, and they ended up right back where they started, in Tombstone.
In Tombstone, in jail, waiting to hang in the morning.
Morgan sat motionless in the jail cell, the same one he had helped Virgil lock rowdy drunks into only three months ago, and stared down at his hands. There was blood on them now, enough blood that it really ought to be visible in some way, a dark stain around his nails and in the lines of his palms. Instead, they looked as clean as they had when he had arrived in town all those months ago.
"You should ask to say your farewells to your wife." Doc's voice was a hoarse whisper, worn away by coughing. His consumption had worsened dramatically in the past two months, as if Wyatt's presence had been the only thing keeping him going all of these years, and losing him had robbed Doc of the strength and will to fight the disease that was slowly destroying his lungs. He had actually fainted once during the trial, rising from the witness chair only to slump into a heap on the courtroom floor. Behan's pet prosecutor had accused him of doing it as a bid for the jury's sympathy, and Doc had glared at him with sunken eyes and told him to go to hell.
Louisa had never fainted, not even when they had announced the verdict. She had stayed silent and straight-backed throughout the entire trial, her blue eyes glued to Morgan's face.
"She wouldn't want to see me," Morgan said. He looked away from his too-clean hands, shifting his gaze to the jail's tobacco-stained floor. "Not after everything I've done. Wherever she goes now, she's going to be a murderer's widow. Every paper from here to San Francisco's run articles about us; she'll never escape the scandal."
"She understands," Doc said. "She was there when-" he broke off, coughing, and then continued, "when Wyatt was—when the Clantons and McLaurys were gunning for us. She was there when Frank Stillwell and his friends attempted to assassinate you. Don't underestimate the fairer sex's facility for anger." The corners of his mouth twitched upward in the ghost of a smile. "Before we left to go after Curly Bill and the others, the lovely Miss Marcus gave me twenty dollars and told me to spend it on bullets."
"Louisa's not like Josephine. She's… softer, more sensitive." Morgan spread his hands, lost for an appropriate adjective. "She shouldn't have to come in here and-"
"If it were me," Doc interrupted, "I'd want to say good-bye."
And Morgan did, desperately, selfishly, even though he knew he shouldn't drag his wife into the jail to say his good-byes to her from inside a cell. Shouldn't subject her to that extra little bit of pain. "In a few minutes," he said wearily. "You got anyone you want to say good-bye to?"
Doc was silent for a long time, slumped back against the cell wall with his eyes closed. When he finally spoke, his voice was even softer than before. "I said my good-byes when I came west. There's only two people I'd want to bother with anyway, and since one's back in Georgia and the other's under six feet of dirt, what's the point?"
There wasn't much one could say to that. "I'm sorry I got you into this, Doc," Morgan offered, after the silence had stretched for a long moment.
Doc attempted a laugh, but it turned into a cough. "As I recall, the whole thing was my idea to begin with." He smiled again; it didn't reach his eyes. "I never did want to die in bed."
Morgan, who had always rather hoped that he would die in bed, preferably with his and Lousia's children and grandchildren clustered around him, sighed, and went to ask Deputy Breckenridge if he could see his wife.
"Then let me die at once, Achilles cried, despairing, "since it was not my fate to save my dearest comrade from his death."
--Homer, the Iliad.